Since then, PC companies such as Compaq and Dell have begun offering PCs which have Linux, not Windows, installed. These informed current and future shareholders that Linux posed a threat to its revenues in the WindowsNT market, which is where much of its future growth and revenue will have to come from. Last September, Steve Ballmer, Microsoft’s president, told a conference that “free software is making inroads into the glass house Are we worried about Linux? .. Sure we are worried” It was the first time Linux had received such recognition Its bandwagon really started to roll. Bugs are legion (and have delayed the newest version of WindowsNT – renamed Windows2000 – for two years).So how much money has Mr Torvalds made out of Linux? “Nothing,” he says. You can see how Linux might be a problem for Microsoft, which acknowledged the fact in its now-famous “Halloween letters”, an obligatory filing to the Securities and Exchange Commission last October.
By contrast, Windows98 costs about pounds 50 (though the cost is usually subsumed into that of the PC it is found on). WindowsNT, for running large networks, will cost hundreds of pounds. PC magazines have given away Linux on free, cover- mounted CDs. It is the co-operative result of hundreds (perhaps thousands) of programmers around the world adding their little bit of expertise to the original software Mr Torvalds released over the Internet in 1991.And one other crucial thing: Linux is free You can download it from the Net without charge. “Bugs” are ironed out in days, sometimes hours, of being made public Yet Linux isn’t any company’s product. It will also run on supercomputers with interlinked processors. Some say it’s the best OS you can get for applications such as running big networks and web servers because of its “stability” – its ability to deal with multiple tasks and users without crashing.
It is an industrial-quality computer operating system (OS) that matches – and in some ways exceeds – Microsoft’s products such as Windows95, Windows98, and WindowsNT. (Operating systems are software which essentially instruct the chip at the heart of every computer how to move data around and present it to the keyboard, monitor, hard drive and other input/output devices in a way meaningful to the user.)Linux will run happily on a desktop PC (the original was written on one with four megabytes of memory, when that was a lot). It’s a small difference, one of emphasis, and there are a few things to emphasise about Linux. As for world domination – Linux could at least cripple, if not kill Microsoft, and halt its growing ubiquity on the world’s computers.Mr Torvalds calls it “Linnucks”, articulated so quickly it’s almost a single syllable, although almost everyone else says “Lie-nucks”. Most of all, he knows the most abstruse things about the Linux operating system He should He wrote it, and still oversees its development.
He doesn’t look the part of a world-dominating super-programmer, although he can spot flaws in huge swathes of computer code and fix them. And I’m still working on Linux.”
Mr Torvalds, a boyish 28-year-old with mousy hair and big glasses, was born in Helsinki, though he lives and works in Santa Clara, in Silicon Valley, down the coast from San Francisco. “Two months before I left Finland [more than two years ago] we had our first child, and another 15 months ago. But as for my daily routine – well, I come in and sit in front of a computer and work on software In that sense, my daily life hasn’t changed much. How does it feel being the man whose Linux software is regarded by Bill Gates as a significant threat that captured an estimated $2bn (pounds 1.25bn) of business from Microsoft this year?
“Well, not that much is different from how it used to be,” he says, after a characteristic pause.
